As Christmas season draws to a close, a respite for independent sellers

ENCINITAS  The last few days before Christmas on any tree lot are slow — a good kind of slow, if you ask Dan Estes.

Like the calm after a yuletide storm, when noble firs fly off the truck and then into homes around North County, Friday afternoon was a welcome respite on the Encinitas property where Estes and his family have sold Christmas trees for 30 years.

“We’re just about sold out — that’s always what you want,” he told me as a chilly breeze filled the CHRISTMAS TREE banner out front like a sail. “That’s part of the business, knowing how many trees and not overdoing it, but still having enough to get you through to the end of the season. I drove by Home Depot and they must have had 400 trees that they were mulching out back.”

That particular home improvement store came up often during our meeting Friday afternoon, perhaps because it represents the big-box retailers that drove the Estes family out of the business in the late 1990s.

“1983 was our first year, and we sold trees in San Diego, La Jolla, Mira Mesa — we had lots everywhere back then,” he recalled. “When the big-box stores came in, that changed the whole marketplace. The price that Home Depot was selling its trees for was typically what we would pay wholesale.

“Well … they have raised their prices over the years to where we can sell a tree and still make a profit,” he said.

So they are back — in 2011, Estes and his wife, Joanne, opened their first tree lot in a decade at the newly renovated Valley Fort Steakhouse off South Mission Road in Fallbrook.

This year, they also reopened the stand in their front yard, here at the end of Encinitas Boulevard, where his parents bought 10 acres on the outskirts of what would become Rancho Santa Fe 48 years ago.

That’s precisely how long Estes has lived here: “There were like three houses in the whole entire valley. It was all soybean fields,” he said, glancing around the now-busy valley with nary a hint of soybeans but plenty of real estate offices and traffic signals.

The house is technically on an unincorporated sliver of land between Encinitas and Rancho Santa Fe, giving it close access to lavishly wealthy neighborhoods — two 13-footers went to the same house this year — but also an agricultural zoning designation that has endured from his parents’ midcentury roots here.

As Estes remembers it, 1986 was his biggest year as a Christmas tree salesman. That year, they operated six lots around the county, including his busiest, a few miles away off El Camino Real.

His son, Nathan, does the bookkeeping, and his 13-year-old daughter, Jackie, helps out around the lot. There are also hired hands, but Estes figures that he does two-thirds of the work himself.

The trees come from Estacada, Ore., by the hundreds — 600 to 800 per truckload — and Estes explained that the family spends up to two off-season months a year in Christmas tree territory up north.

“We’re always looking for the better tree,” he said. “There’s a lot of people in the tree business, so you have to find the right farmer — somebody who’s fully involved and has a good product.

“Up there, tree prices got so high, everybody and their brother were planting trees,” he said. “So there’s actually a glut of noble fir trees over the last few years, which really brought the prices down. Everybody thought they were going to make a fortune growing Christmas trees. That helped us out immensely.”

In Fallbrook, Estes is the only show in town.

“It’s really worked out well for us, because the first year we were there, I think there were two other tree lots,” he said.

But the town’s iconic cut-it-yourself tree lot, Mission Pines, closed two years ago, and the Boy Scouts haven’t been selling in Fallbrook recently, either.

It added up to huge sales for the Valley Fort Christmas tree business: “We brought our pricing down this year … and we probably sold twice as many trees in Fallbrook as we did the year before.”

There was even one day when the Fallbrook location sold 125 trees in four hours.

“People were lined up and we couldn’t get trees out fast enough,” Estes recalled. “I think we cleared the lot a couple of times.”

More than a decade after the big-box stores edged the Estes family out, he said it is good to be back.

A well-spoken man with a welcoming way about him, Estes wore blue jeans and greeted only one family during the time I was present on Friday. To them, he sold and would later deliver a $95 noble fir. Two boys tossed a football, and a girl picked out a waist-high tree for her room.

The tally bested $200, and the parents seemed pleased with their finds.

“We’ve seen customers who used to come in a long time ago with their families,” he said. “We’re trying to make it very family-oriented and community-oriented. We’re not just out-of-towners who come in, set up the lot, make our money and leave. We’re involved with the community.”

Still, a man can only take so much of this sort of involvement before it’s time for a rest.

“I start at 4:30 every morning, and when business is strong and we’re moving trees, we go till 11 o’clock at night — it’s nonstop for a good 45 days,” he told me. “There’s a lot involved in getting the lots open, also, with Christmas tree shipments coming down and trying to set up. We don’t just flip a switch and have a tree lot. There’s a lot involved.”

Know anyone with an interesting job, history or outlook on life? Contact Tom Pfingsten at fallbrooktown@gmail.com